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Comment: Very Good Complete Book Set - (Box/Slipcase NOT Included) - Standard used condition books with the text inside being clean and unmarked - Exterior of the books show moderate signs of usage

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Now in a paperback boxed set, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker).A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A loving documentary and brutal fable, a mix of compassion and stoicism [that] sums up the experience of the Holocaust with as much power and as little pretension as any other work I can think of.”—The New Republic

“A quiet triumph, moving and simple—impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics.”—The Washington Post

“Spiegelman has turned the exuberant fantasy of comics inside out by giving us the most incredible fantasy in comics’ history: something that actually occurred . . . The central relationship is not that of cat and mouse, but that of Art and Vladek. Maus is terrifying not for its brutality, but for its tenderness and guilt.”—The New Yorker

“All too infrequently, a book comes along that’s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is just such a book.”—Esquire

“An epic story told in tiny pictures.”—The New York Times

“A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution . . . at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant.”—Jules Feffer

Top customer reviews

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Browsing through the reviews and comments about Maus, I saw that there was some question as to whether the hardcover edition comprised Parts I and II. This is understandable because the product is listed in Amazon as "The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (No 1)," which seems contradictory.

When I was considering purchasing it, I looked at the number of pages that were listed for the edition and guessed that it included both parts of the story. So I bought it, it arrived fine, and I am now writing to confirm that yes, this edition includes I and II.

Amazon should look into this and remove the "(No 1)" from the listing's title.

I am going to preface this review by saying that I have a general disdain for graphic novels. There was a time that I would never elect to read one of my own volition. That all changed when I was assigned Maus for an English class. Upon hearing that our syllabus included a graphic novel, I groaned in tacit protest. I read both volumes of Maus cover to cover before the assigned completion date, and was very moved by the story, which is about a son trying to understand his Holocaust-survivor father. There are no images of humans in this book--the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the Poles as pigs. The protagonist has always felt a void between he and his father, but develops some understanding and compassion as he begins interviewing him about his experiences in the Holocaust. In terms of Holocaust literature, I would deem this a "must-read".

I made the “mistake” of purchasing Maus II over 20 years ago (simply because the bookstore didn’t have the first volume). Regardless, I found the comic book presentation of the Holocaust surprisingly effective in generating such an emotional read. It took a while, but seeing Maus II sitting on a book shelf without it preceding volume finally bothered me enough to get MAUS – MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY. While the second volume (MAUS II) stands fine on its own, MAUS certainly serves as the glue that holds the entire story together.

For the most part, I’m am not a fan of comic books, but Art Spiegelman’s art captivated me at an early age. Spiegelman is one of the original artists that contributed to my first childhood passion: Wacky Packages (trading cards/stickers that satirized common household products). While I didn’t initially connect the dots between the 70s fad and Holocaust-themed comic book, I now see the way Spiegelman attracts me to his work. There is a subtle complexity to his rather simple drawings that made reading MAUS both thought-provoking and memorable.

I found MAUS to be two stories presented as one. The main storyline is the story of his father Vladeck’s plight as a Jew living in Poland before and during World War II (just before he and his wife Anja are sent to Auschwitz). The second storyline is about the author’s relationship with his father, which is revealed as the son presses his father to talk about surviving the Holocaust. While the story of Spiegelman’s parents is certainly compelling, the metaphorical manner in which it is illustrated is what sticks. Spiegelman uses animals to represent groups/races of people in a way that reminds me of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Jews are presented as mice … meek pests/vermin that are easy to kill. Nazis/Germans are depicted as rather vicious cats (that kill the vermin) and Poles are shown as pigs (perhaps a reference to the fact that many Poles betrayed Jews in their country to the Nazis … in other words, swine). I found graphic metaphors ingenious as they add a significant emotional tone to the story being told. The Holocaust storyline comprises the bulk of the book’s illustrations with the father/son moments serving as bridges in between events. As we come to understand the suffering of Spiegelman’s parents, we learn that his mother (Anja) killed herself in 1968, leaving a large void in his life. There is an obvious yearning for Spiegelman to learn more about his mother through his father, yet the task proves to be challenging.

On the surface, the concept of a Holocaust-related “comic book” seems awkward, but I found MAUS to be a magnificent and poignant read. It is also hard to put down … I read the entire book without stopping in short order. I would highly recommend MAUS (and MAUS II, for that matter) for providing a provocatively unique perspective of the Holocaust. This series intrigued me enough to pick up a copy of “MetaMaus”, which meticulously (and exhaustively) explores the author’s motive for MAUS/MAUS II, as well as detailing more of his parents’ lives.

I rarely read graphic novels or comics, but found this a very interesting read. The author has found a very clever way to write a feature-length comic-book novel, telling an accessible mini-history of his father's experiences during the WWII Holocaust in Poland (his father and mother being survivors of the camps), intermingled with a second "current-day" story line illustrating his father's current domestic challenges and the author's own, sometimes fraught relationship with him.

The story is extremely easy to understand and follow when laid out this way, even though I already knew most of this from a more general historical perspective. Showing different nationalities as different animals is a clever way to help keep the players straight.

I strongly disagree with the criticism leveled by other reviewers that try to assign some significance to the animals chosen for each nationality, My own belief is that the only choice meant to convey any real meaning was that of showing Jewish characters as mice and Nazis as cats, illustrating the relative "power" that the cats had over the mice, and the fact that the "mice" were always being hunted and could not even safely walk on streets where there were "cats." The one or two French were shown as frogs, the Americans were dogs, and the Poles were pigs. Those who believe the author somehow intended any of these to be broader comments on those nationalities, for better or worse, are just reading too much into it. In particular, showing Poles as pigs was not intended to be an insult, and those who think otherwise are just looking for reasons to be offended.

Some of the comic illustrations were very inventive. At some points in the story, the author's father is walking around in Poland amongst the general population (outside the Jewish ghetto, that is), and acting as though he belongs there, knowing that it will not be easy to tell he is Jewish if he acts like he belongs there; in effect, he is "masquerading" as a Pole, and the cartoons of these scenes show him with a pig mask over his normally mouse face, showing that he is passing for a Pole.

Certainly nothing about the Holocaust is anything to laugh at, and in fact, in most treatments on the subject, too much detail can sometimes overwhelm a reader. The author suspends his father's narrative at regular intervals and cuts to their present-day conversation, where they talk about his father's domestic situation, his health, his personal frugality and other habits, etc. This is a mini-drama all my itself that at times can almost be amusing, and gives the reader a periodic break from the heavier part of the story. You can also see how certain ways that his father behaves have been influenced by his experience.

This is a interesting way to learn about a part of history that too many these days seem to be strangely unaware of. (When I was growing up, everyone knew about this.) It is easily read and understood, and even at almost 300 pages, I read it in less than a day.